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TYLER – A new lithium mining project planned in Northeast Texas has received the green light from the Trump Administration.

“What’s exciting about East Texas in particular is the lithium grade there,” CEO of Standard Lithium, Jesse Edmondson, said.

According to our news partner KETK, parts of the East Texas region will be home to Standard Lithium’s second commercial project to extract the precious mineral from saltwater thousands of feet underground.

” We see most of the growth of our company over the next decade will be in East Texas,” Edmondson said.

The Canada-based company went through a federal permitting review process in the U.S., which determined a very minimal environmental impact to our water, air, and landscape.

“You’re talking about on the order of a dozen to two dozen well pads, each one of which can have multiple wells drilled off of them. Then the surface disturbance is really limited to those well pads themselves and then the central processing facility,” Edmondson said.

The company’s flagship projects in the U.S. are located in what’s called the ” Smackover Formation.” It focuses on the areas in Franklin County and parts of Hopkins and Titus counties.

The average grade for our Franklin project is just over 600 milligrams per liter, but we’ve actually drilled a hole in that project area that was as high as is 800 milligrams per liter, so these are truly globally significant world class numbers and it’s really exciting for the company, we think for East Texas and for our country that we’re currently reliant on China for lithium and for lithium chemicals, so which are critical for modern battery technology,” Edmondson said.

Edmondson said the project is different from Lithium-ion battery storage facilities and focuses on extraction.

Most recently, a storage project was halted by a district judge in Van Zandt County.

“We don’t have the capacity to fight those kinds of fires, so if they don’t comply with the fire code, they should be redesigned,” Van Zandt Co. Precinct 2 Commissioner Cliff Williams said.

Williams hopes the new mining project will comply with state and national codes and not kick people out of their homes.

“That [mining project] is done in such a way that it respects the property ownership of those owners that live out there next door to where these operations are going to be taking place,” Williams said.

The extraction project is still in the early stages, and construction wouldn’t begin until at least 2030. Standard Lithium said this massive project will bring hundreds of jobs to the area.

LAREDO (AP) – Six people who were found dead in a rail yard shipping container in Laredo were from Honduras and Mexico and included a 14-year-old boy, all part of a human smuggling effort on a freight train, authorities said Thursday.

Police released more details about the discovery made Sunday in Laredo, near the U.S. border with Mexico, but said federal authorities were leading the investigation.

“They did not pass away in our city, but they were discovered here after hours of suffering,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said at a news conference. “We are demanding justice for these lives lost. It doesn’t matter where they came from.”

The bodies were discovered by a Union Pacific employee. The Webb County medical examiner suspects the deaths were caused by hyperthermia, or heat stroke, a conclusion repeated by the mayor on Thursday.

The six people were put in the shipping container on Saturday in Del Rio, Texas, two days after the train departed from Long Beach, California, Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez Jr. said.

He said the train traveled to the San Antonio area from Del Rio before arriving Sunday in Laredo. Laredo is a busy land port for trade on the U.S.-Mexico border and a common nexus for the illegal movement of people.

“We did not know what we had at the beginning. We did not know that it was a human smuggling situation,” said Rodriguez, who declined to release further details about the route.
Texas News

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said he believes a seventh person in the group also died. The body of a 49-year-old Mexican man was found Monday in the San Antonio area, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Laredo.

“He may have been either thrown from the train after being found deceased or fell from the train and (died) as a result,” Salazar told reporters earlier this week.

The sheriff also disclosed that San Antonio police took a call Saturday from a relative of someone in the shipping container who had been informed about the oppressive conditions. Salazar said police were dispatched but didn’t find the container.

“This is my estimate: 120, 150 degrees inside these things,” he said of heat (topping 48 degrees Celsius).

Smuggling on trains has long been a concern, partly because trains headed to the United States often slow or stop in Mexico before crossing the border. That creates an opportunity for smugglers or immigrants to climb aboard or hide drugs or other contraband on a train before it enters the U.S.

Two smugglers last year were sentenced to life in prison for what remains the nation’s deadliest human smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border. They were convicted of the deaths of 53 migrants found in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer in Texas in 2022.

About 40 people were encountered daily in March crossing illegally by Border Patrol agents in Laredo, making it the third busiest sector among nine along the border with Mexico, according to the agency’s statistics.

AUSTIN (AP) — The small plane that crashed while carrying four pickleball players to a tournament near Austin last month had problems with freezing instruments before it broke apart midair, according to a preliminary federal investigation report released Friday.

The Cessna 421C took off from Amarillo on April 30 at 9:10 p.m. and crashed at about 11 p.m. in Wimberley, a city about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southwest of Austin. Pilot Justin Appling and passengers Hayden Dillard, Brooke Skypala, Stacy Hedrick and Seren Wilson died.

The National Transportation Safety Board report said that during the flight, the pilot reported problems with the plane’s anti-icing system that protects onboard instruments.

He later reported an instrument that measures airspeed had “iced up” and that he was using backup gauges. He was cleared to descend to 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) and told air controllers he wanted to get to a lower altitude to try to “warm back up.”

Over the last 15 minutes before the crash, the plane flew at altitudes where temperatures hovered just below freezing, according to the report.

The pilot’s last radio transmission with air controllers was made at 10:59 p.m. The plane then made a series of descending left and right turns before crashing to the ground.

Investigators found pieces of the plane over a 1.25-mile (2-kilometer) debris field, distribution consistent with an “inflight breakup,” the report said.

It was mostly cloudy in the area shortly before the crash, and there was a thunderstorm two hours later, the National Weather Service said.

A second plane traveling with the group landed safely in New Braunfels.

AUSTIN (AP) – The nation’s largest children’s hospital has agreed to a legal settlement with Texas and the Trump administration over gender-affirming care for transgender youth that includes a $10 million payment to the state, the administration and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday.

Texas Children’s Hospital, based in Houston, said in a statement that it had agreed to the settlement “to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.” The hospital, which serves more than 1 million patients annually, said Paxton’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated its care for three years, forcing it to “navigate an unconscionable campaign of mistruths and mischaracterizations.”

The hospital announced in 2022 that it would stop gender-affirming hormone treatments for minors after Paxton issued a legal opinion calling such care “child abuse” and Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of care as abuse. In 2023, Texas became the most populous state to ban gender-affirming care for minors — at least 27 ban or restrict it — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that states can do so.

Paxton said the settlement will require Texas Children’s to set up a “detransition clinic” to provide free care to transgender patients for five years to “reverse the damage” from gender-affirming care. He described it as the first “detransition clinic” of its kind in the nation, although that could not immediately be confirmed.

“This historic settlement reflects an institutional and fundamental shift away from radical ‘gender’ ideology,” Paxton said in announcing the settlement.

Paxton’s office did not release a copy of the agreement, and the statement from Texas Children’s did not discuss its specific terms.

The leader of the LGBTQ rights group Equality Texas said Texas Children’s “has lost its integrity and put politics over patients” and called the settlement “embarrassing.”

“Paxton is blackmailing a hospital system into creating a resource that no one is asking for,” CEO Brad Pritchett said in a statement. “It ignores the actual science and years of data about the overwhelming benefits of gender-affirming care.”

Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has moved to use its regulatory power to block gender-affirming care for minors, and the DOJ has demanded access to providers’ records. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement Friday that the DOJ would “use every weapon at its disposal” to stop gender-affirming care for children.

Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate, and he announced the settlement less than two weeks before a May 26 runoff with him locked in a tight race to unseat GOP incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. President Donald Trump — who has aggressively sought to roll back transgender rights — has not publicly endorsed a candidate in the race.

Most major medical groups see access to gender-affirming care as important for people with gender dysphoria. Transgender youth, parents and providers have described it as life-saving for youth who are depressed or suicidal because their gender identities do not match the sex assigned them at birth.

Gender-affirming care may include counseling, medications that block puberty, hormone therapy to produce physical changes or surgeries to transform chests and genitals, although those are rare for minors.

The hospital said it fully cooperated with Paxton’s office and the DOJ, produced more than 5 million documents and did its own internal investigations. All of them showed that it never violated the law, the hospital said.

“These efforts have required significant staff time and financial resources to defend ourselves,” its statement said. “This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists.”

Paxton said the agreement also requires Texas Children’s to fire — “and never again hire” — five doctors who provided gender-affirming care, agree never to provide such care and to change its bylaws so that any doctor violating the state law automatically loses any privileges at the hospital.

The $10 million payment will go to the state’s Medicaid program. Paxton had accused the hospital of submitting false billings, an allegation it rejected.

AUSTIN (AP) — The Texas Supreme Court on Friday refused to declare that Democratic lawmakers who briefly fled the state in 2025 to block a vote on new congressional maps pushed by President Donald Trump had vacated their office.

The all-Republican court dealt a blow to Gov. Greg Abbott and state Republicans in their efforts to severely punish the more than 50 Democrats who bolted for New York, Illinois and Massachusetts in a bid to stop a vote on the maps during a special session.

The Texas redistricting effort kick-started cascading efforts by both parties across the country to redraw voting maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections: Republicans, pushed by Trump, seek to hold their slim majority in Congress as Democrats try to counter them.

Those efforts have gained new intensity after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act by no longer allowing race to be considered in how congressional and other districts are drawn.

In Texas, Abbott had argued in a lawsuit filed directly to the state’s highest civil court that state Rep. Gene Wu, the leader of the House Democratic caucus, and others had effectively abandoned their office.

If successful, they hoped to wield a new hammer to threaten lawmakers considering any future quorum breaks.

Wu had argued that he was not abandoning his office, but was exercising a right to dissent.

In denying Abbott’s request, the court opinion written by Justice James Blacklock noted that the Republican-majority Legislature had adequately resolved the problem itself through measures such as fines against the missing lawmakers, and it noted they eventually returned on their own within a few weeks.

“In the end, a quorum was restored in two weeks’ time, without judicial intervention, by the interplay of political and practical forces,” Blacklock wrote.

“Courts have uniformly recognized that it is not their role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves,” the opinion said.

If the issue rises again and the Legislature cannot effectively compel lawmakers to return, the court may someday consider whether the courts should step in, the opinion said.

“When Greg Abbott threatened to arrest and expel us for denying him a quorum, we told him he should ‘come and take it.’ He tried!” Wu said in a statement Friday. “Abbott was wrong, weak, and after all his bluster, he couldn’t come and take a damn thing.”

Wu and the other lawmakers eventually returned to Texas, and the new map was passed and signed into law by Abbott.

Wu had argued that because he had returned to the Capitol and the map was eventually signed into law, there was no longer any reason for the court to weigh in.

If lawmakers leave again, the governor will bring the same issue back to the court, Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said Friday.

“No elected official has the right to abandon their duties, flee the state and shut down the people’s business,” Mahaleris said. “Governor Abbott’s legal action is what brought derelict Democrats back to Texas to do their jobs and pass the Big Beautiful Map.”

The state constitution requires that at least 100 of the 150 House members be present to conduct business, and the quorum break effectively shut down a special legislative session Abbott had called to address redistricting and other issues.

And Texas has a history of walkouts.

In 2021, the court ruled that the Texas Constitution enables the possibility of a quorum break but also allows for consequences to bring members back.

Last year’s Democratic walkout was the third since 2003, when lawmakers bolted to stop a vote on a redistricting bill. They did it again in 2021 over an elections bill. In both cases, they were temporary victories as Democrats eventually returned and the Republican majority in the Legislature ultimately passed both measures into law.

FORT BLISS (AP) – The wife of a U.S. Army sergeant has been released from federal immigration custody after spending a month in detention.

Sgt. Jose Serrano, an active duty soldier stationed in Texas who served three tours in Afghanistan, previously told The Associated Press that immigration agents arrested his wife, Deisy Rivera Ortega, during an April 14 appointment with immigration services to advance her application for permanent residency.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat and combat veteran, told the AP that she personally contacted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Wednesday to advocate for Rivera Ortega’s release after learning of her situation from advocacy groups. Rivera Ortega returned home Thursday evening.

“Rivera-Ortega has been released from ICE custody with a GPS tracking device, mandatory home visits, and ICE office check-ins. She will receive full due process,” said the DHS, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The family of Rivera Ortega did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Serrano, who is stationed in the Fort Bliss area, and Rivera Ortega have been married since 2022. According to the DHS, Rivera Ortega entered the U.S. illegally in 2016 and a judge issued a final order of removal for her in December 2019.

Rivera Ortega, an El Salvador native who was employed by two hotels, held a military spouse ID card and a valid work permit, according to Duckworth’s office. She had been applying for the parole-in-place program designed to shield the immediate relatives of military family members from immigration enforcement as they take steps to adjust their legal status.

Last April, DHS eliminated a 2022 policy that considered military service of an immediate family member to be a “significant mitigating factor” in deciding whether or not to pursue immigration enforcement. The administration’s new policy states that “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”

Advocates for military families have warned that detaining spouses of active duty soldiers is a national security threat because it prevents soldiers from remaining focused on their military service.

“Our active duty service members, some of whom are deployed themselves, should not have to worry about whether or not their spouse, who oftentimes is the primary caregiver for their children, is going to be detained, and then who’s going to look after the children,” Duckworth told the AP. “Our war fighters need to be talking and thinking and solely focused on the enemy who would do us harm and who would attack the United States, and they should not have to worry about the well-being of their family members back at home.”

According to DHS, more than 100 immediate family members of military veterans have been placed into removal proceedings under the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. The administration said it has also placed 34 military veterans in removal proceedings as of Jan. 26.

Following public outcry and intervention from congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, spouses of veterans and active duty U.S. soldiers have been released from federal immigration custody in some cases.